Audible 'Times Square Billboards'

January 2013

After creating a successful TVC campaign for Audible audio books, Framestore’s Design team were approached, direct from client, to imagine a 15 second animation for a digital cube screen in Times Square. The campaign centred on images that would illustrate a book genre using a smart phone’s headphone chords. For this particular project, as you might guess, the theme was science fiction.

Maryanne Butler, who directed the project with her team explains, “the brief was both exciting and challenging as we had to choreograph an animation based on two square screens that met at 90 degree angles to one another, wrapped around the corner of a building. We had to clearly tell the same story on both individual screens but also looked for an opportunity to do something special with the merging corner to make it interesting for anybody looking up at that angle.”

“We came up with the idea of creating a whole alien face made up of two halves that would join in the middle for a quick blink. The result was fun and it was a bonus to see this piece in the middle of Times Square”

Designers Zack Lydon and Dan Solomon created the alien and spaceship images and also the animation, which was hand-draw in Flash, then traced using Illustrator curves, which were imported and converted in Houdini. David Mellor used his magic to translate the animation curves into fully rendered 3D chords, attached to a modelled CG phone to bring it all to life.